Change management anyone?

It’s been a hectic week for me. Back to back Board meetings and few other outstanding works that needs equal attention as their deadlines have passed earlier. Call it bad planning if you want. But I think I’m the kind of guy who work best under pressure.. or so I thought.

Anyway as promised, I will once again share with you on change management program. To begin to understand change management, first we need to know what it means. There are many different definitions of change management if you care to google in the net. However, for the purpose of this Blog, change management can be defined as the controlled transformation of an organization from its current operational state to a future operational state.

There are currently at least two schools of thought on change and change management. The first school of thought is based on Lewin’s Three Stage Model. The Three Stage Model uses the concept of Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze, which basically has the Organization moving from stability (Unfreeze from status quo) through change back to stability (new status quo).(See link on Lewin’s Three Stage Model for more information on the Three Stage Model).

The second school of thought, is as articulated by Professor John Kotter (named by BusinessWeek magazine, in a poll of US managers, as ‘The Number 1 leadership and change guru’). Professor Kotter (who teaches Leadership at Harvard Business School) has made it his business to study both success and failure in change initiatives in business. Kotter developed a list of factors that he believes lead to successful changes, and those that lead to failure. He has devised an 8 step method where the first four steps focus on de-freezing the organization, the next three steps make the change happen, and the last step re-freezes the organization with a new culture. When people need to make big changes significantly and effectively, he says that this goes best if the 8 steps happen in order.

Here are the eight steps summarised from Leading Change by John P. Kotter:-

1) Create a sense of urgency

2) Put together a strong enough team to direct the process

3) Create an appropriate vision

4) Communicate that vision broadly

5) Empower employees to act on the vision

6) Produce sufficient short-term results to give their efforts credibility

7) Build momentum and use that momentum to tackle tougher change problems

8) Anchor the new behaviour in the organisational culture

Basically, he suggests that to ignore any of the eight stages will likely lead to failure in any change process. In other words, his message is simple:

1) To lead change, you need to follow each of the steps

2) Skip a stage and you will reduce your chances of success

Will speak of these in more details soon. Until then have a productive weekend.